U.S.|Latent Prejudice Stirs When a Black Man Tries to Join a Charleston Club

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Latent Prejudice Stirs When a Black Man Tries to Join a Charleston Club

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Dr. W. Melvin Brown III at his home in Charleston, S.C. At the encouragement of white friends in the Charleston Rifle Club, he applied for membership, but was rejected.CreditCreditHunter McRae for The New York Times

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Though the Charleston Rifle Club was founded in 1855 to promote good marksmanship, it is better known today for a more prosaic pastime, bowling. And though the sign out front, with its lion-flanked escutcheon and Gothic lettering, gives off a whiff of high society, the club’s membership spans classes, embracing socialites and police officers, lawyers and factory workers.

But it could find no place for Dr. W. Melvin Brown III.

On a Monday night in October, Dr. Brown, a respected emergency-room doctor and native Charlestonian, waited in a hallway of the private club with 13 other men who hoped to be voted in. One of the members who sponsored Dr. Brown’s application had introduced him at the club’s monthly meeting, emphasizing his good character, local roots and military service.

Then the nominees were ushered out of the room, and the 50-odd club members in attendance began scooping up handfuls of marbles. There were 14 small boxes, each marked with an applicant’s name: A white marble dropped in was a yes vote, a black one meant no. Six or more black marbles would spell rejection.

Dr. Brown was the only African-American nominee, and the only one to receive a subtle tap on the shoulder on the way back into the room. Eleven black marbles had been dropped in his box.

And so, instead of quietly crossing one of the uncodified racial barriers that linger in American life, Dr. Brown, 49, found himself standing outside the clubhouse, in the salt air along the Ashley River, taking the measure of his feelings.

He was stunned, but not wholly surprised. “A huge disappointment,” he said later, “and a little embarrassment.”

The thwarted plan to make Dr. Brown the all-white club’s first black member had been both casual and serious. He had white drinking buddies who belonged to the club, and they wanted him to be able to join them there for a beer or two.

But it was also a calculated effort to nudge a tradition-soaked Southern city into the 21st century. And when they met with resistance, Dr. Brown’s friends were furious.

James W. Ledlie, a lawyer who co-sponsored Dr. Brown’s membership bid, rushed outside and apologized to his friend. Then he went back into the meeting, livid.

“What happened here tonight is disgusting and despicable,” he recalls telling the members in the room. “There’s no question what happened here. And it’s wrong.”

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The Charleston Rifle Club’s grounds along the Ashley River adjoin a once largely black neighborhood that has seen an influx of affluent white residents in recent years.CreditHunter McRae for The New York Times

In the following weeks, Dr. Brown’s story escaped the walls of the rifle club, spreading disappointment and embarrassment through a city still grappling with the pain of the June 2015 massacre of nine black people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white supremacist from out of town. In its aftermath, a multiethnic crowd of thousands gathered to protest and pray, and insisted that Charleston was not that kind of place.

And now there is this small, ugly, unresolved matter. It has forced Charleston to consider which lines have been erased and which remain, in a former slave port more recently reborn as a tourist destination and glittering global arts hub.

“What this is is an aberration, and a slight from these few bigoted people in that club,” said Joseph P. Riley Jr., 75, a white former mayor of Charleston and longtime liberal on racial matters. “They’re not representative.”

Dorothy Scott, the president of the local N.A.A.C.P., disagreed. “We are a very polite city,” she said. “But even when our best and our brightest show up, the color of your skin is still the one thing you can’t change.”

Dr. Brown’s rejection, first reported by The Post and Courier newspaper, drew widespread condemnation. The local March of Dimes said it would no longer hold its annual bowling tournament at the club, as it had done since 1945. The Kiwanis Club no longer meets there. The College of Charleston and Porter-Gaud, the prestigious local prep school that Dr. Brown attended, have also severed ties.

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The club’s president and members of its board did not respond to repeated attempts to reach them for comment. One reform-minded club member who spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of damaging professional relationships, wondered whether the club’s days might be numbered. “Who’s going to touch us?” he said. “We’re radioactive.”

The rifle club, with about 800 current members, has played a significant role in Charleston’s history. Founded by German immigrants, the club’s annual schützenfest, a festival built around sport-shooting, grew after the Civil War into the city’s biggest public party.

During the volatile days of Reconstruction, though, the club allowed other clubs of armed white men to march in the schützenfest parade. Jeff Strickland, an associate professor of history at Montclair State University in New Jersey, contends that their presence turned the parade into an intimidating expression of white paramilitary force, as groups like the Ku Klux Klan began terrorizing newly freed blacks in the South.

The connection with German ethnic pride had long since dwindled when Dr. Brown was growing up a couple of miles away. He knew the place as just another whites-only club still dotting neighborhoods like his on Charleston’s upper peninsula, which had once been majority white but had flipped to majority black after the city desegregated its schools.

But in other ways, Dr. Brown felt welcome in the city. His father, the founder of a military contractor that at one point employed more than 300 people, served on civic boards and commissions and moved easily in white society; Mayor Riley eulogized him when he died in 1994.

“All my life, no matter where I went, strange Caucasian men would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I know your father, great guy,’” Dr. Brown recalled.

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James W. Ledlie, a lawyer who co-sponsored Dr. Brown for membership, said he had no doubt that unspoken racism was behind his rejection.CreditHunter McRae for The New York Times

At Porter-Gaud, the prep school, he was one of fewer than 10 black students on a campus of 750; he played football, sang in the glee club, and made lifelong friends. He was accepted into the Naval Academy, earned a medical degree, served two tours in Afghanistan, and retired from military service in 2015 to return to Charleston for good, taking a job in a local emergency room and settling with his family in a smart Craftsman-style house close to where he grew up.

By then, the upper peninsula neighborhoods were changing again. Upper-middle-class whites were moving in, including some of the friends Dr. Brown had made over the years. And they discovered the rifle club, with its $175 yearly dues, cheap cold beer and 1,800-foot dock.

One of them was Tommy Dew, 52, a tour-guide operator. He calls himself an ultraconservative, and refers to the Civil War as “the war between the states.” He also hoped when he joined the rifle club about seven years ago that it could evolve, with new buildings, a swimming pool, and crucially, a membership reflecting the neighborhood.

Mr. Dew and his allies began to bring black friends to the club’s bowling alley as guests, including Darius Rucker, singer in the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, and Corey Alston, a weaver of sweetgrass baskets. The members fawned over Mr. Rucker. Mr. Alston said he had a great time.

Dr. Brown was the one black friend they persuaded to try for membership. Their hopes were high, given his easygoing manner, his military service and his deep Charleston roots. In a city where there is cachet in being native — a “been-hya,” as the locals say, and not a “come-hya” — Dr. Brown was pure been-hya.

At his last military posting in Jacksonville, Fla., Dr. Brown had been happily surprised to be accepted into the nearly all-white Florida Yacht Club. “I’m thinking to myself, I guess this is how you fight perceptions,” he said. “And my kids love it. They’re getting hamburgers by the pool. Then I get to Charleston, and my friends are like, ‘Let’s do it.’”

But there was trouble nearly from the beginning. “After Melvin’s application was received, there was immediate pushback,” Mr. Dew said. “There was a buzz, and it was kind of like a wildfire. People were saying, ‘We’ve got a black applicant, we’ve got a black applicant!’ And it was a mixed reaction, positive and negative. But the negative was strong enough that it was communicated to me” that he was going to be rejected.

Mr. Dew and his allies tried in March to get the club to ease its rules so that an application would not be blocked by just six black marbles in a club of 800 members. But they failed.

The club’s two monthly meetings since the October vote have been rancorous, according to numerous people who attended. Some argued that the rejection had nothing to do with race, a claim that left Dr. Brown’s friends scoffing. Some members were angry that the episode had leaked to the press.

On the night of the December meeting, Dr. Brown was sitting at the bar at Leon’s, an oyster and chicken place a few blocks from home. The club’s bylaws say he must wait a year before reapplying, and he is not sure he will. He has told his friends not to quit, and to keep fighting.

He said he still believes racial relations are getting better in America, despite the headlines. He spoke about how seeing the world in the Navy broadened him. He spoke of the respect he tried to show men under his command — some of them rural Southern whites — and how they often reciprocated.

“The best way to fight racism,” he said, “is to meet people.”

He talked about a white girl in the eighth grade who hurt him more than the rifle club did. There was something between them he said, a rapport, and he asked her to be his girlfriend. She answered him with a note that was short on explanation. But an explanation was unnecessary.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I can’t.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: At Casual Place for a Friendly Beer, a ‘Despicable’ Divide. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe